Make the Economic victory a rewarding active choice by requiring the player to divert their positive net income towards filling a meter, and rewarding them with a 0%-50% inflation reduction based on how full the meter is.


This would take the form of a toggle in the UI, which when activated would add all positive net income to the meter at the end of each turn until turned off, representing investment in a Dust cache intended to reach critical mass and trigger a victory.

This would drastically improve on two major flaws of the current Economy Victory:


Accidental: Many players turn off Economic victory because they or an opponent will accidentally acquire it in the process of running a functional empire, which cannot happen with any other victory. By requiring players to actively spend Dust to move closer to victory, Economic victory becomes an active choice with an element of financial risk.


Inflationary: Current Economic victory counts the players direct net income, and as such the player must drive inflation to win, constantly reducing the value of their own money. By asking the player to divert their income to invest in victory and rewarding them for it with inflation reductions, the pursuit of income becomes more useful for normal gameplay and reduces the problem of Dust empires shooting themselves in the foot with inflation.


This idea would likely call for a small nerf to most sources of Buyout Cost Reduction, due to the redundancy with inflation reduction.